The Daily Buzz with Eugene Hernandez (Day 1) by FilmLinc

Snow hit Park City, UT last night just as folks started to arrive en masse for the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, a fact worth mentioning because up until then there had been none. Bare brown hills greeted those who arrived here early. But by morning today, as Film Society of Lincoln Center launched its first daily podcast from Utah, a fresh blanket of white covered the mountain town.

Brooks Barnes from The New York Times and Brian Brooks from Deadline joined “The Daily Buzz” from Sundance this morning, tipping some of the movies to watch and breaking down the business side of the fest as it gets underway.

Fresh from this week’s Art House Convergence, an annual gathering of art house theater owners and programmers from around the country, Tim League sat down to talk about some of the big issues facing independent theater owners today. The move to digital, at the expense of 35mm cinema, was a hot topic.

League runs the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, TX, a festive indie chain of movie theaters that has developed quite a following for its unique programming and fun atmosphere. He’s here in Utah looking for films for his new distribution label. He said he likes to find movies that some might call trash. For him and his colleagues, they are treasures.

Sundance veteran David D’Arcy joined Jen Yamato from Movieline and Marlow Stern from The Daily Beast for a roundtable discussion. The trio tipped Gareth Evans’s The Raid, Lesley Headland’s Bachelorette, and Ira Sachs’s Keep The Lights On as films to watch at this year’s fest.

Tune in to the podcast of today’s show, below, to hear the entire broadcast, including an extended conversation with Sundance insiders Laura Kim and Paul Federbush. Join us again tomorrow (and every day through the end of the festival), when we’ll have interviews with filmmakers Ira Sachs (Keep The Lights On) and Sally El Hosani (My Brother The Devil), as well as a conversation with HBO Documentary chief Sheila Nevins and journalists from Indiewire and Movie City News.

Track us anytime on Twitter, ask questions or join the conversation using: #SundanceBuzz.